I made it. Slowly (18 hours or so) but surely (no problems with immigration or anything!).

Me in the Royal Park Lodge hotel… exciting ain’t it? Yeah, right. I feel a bubble of culture shock looming up from the depths of my stomach… Or perhaps that’s just the hotel coffee.I’m currently in the hotel lobby where they DO NOT in fact have wireless, although there are plenty of wifi signals in the area that I’m picking up from my window they’re all encrypted or, perhaps worse, my computer is just not successfully connecting to them (same problem I was having in San Francisco sometimes). Bangkok seems like it has taken to wifi quite well, the only problem being that whoever owns those connections is smart enough to encrypt them. Damn.

The hotel, the Royal Asia Lodge, is okay at best. The bathroom looks like it could use a serious makeover and the ceiling is kinda claustrophobic. The window is tiny but adequate. Air conditioning works however, which may be my saviour. I’ve aclimated to North American weather and temperatures already I suppose, cuz it’s DAMN HUMID here. 33C temperatures in this kind of humidity are rather strangling to say the least (maybe it’s good for my cough though?). The hotel bed is alright; it’s kinda old school with switches for radio and the lights and stuff built into a wooden panel, and it’s at least queen sized. I spent the night trying to find a comfortable temperature though, mostly due to my ineptness in dealing with the air conditioning compared to the fresh air from the window and dealing with trying to sleep in my silk sleep sack for fear of bed bugs (I’ll know soon whether or not my fears are rational as I didn’t have much luck just staying put in the sack).

Yesterday was a long 36 hour day (got a touch of sleep on the first flight though) and I slept 5 hours last night. It’s now 12:30pm local time and I’m trying to debate whether or not to try to post all the entries I wrote on the flights yesterday. We’ll see in a bit I guess!

The hotel does have a little golf cart and driver to take you to the main road from the hotel, the main road being Sukhumvit Road, a main strip, about 400m down the street.